there is no other way to explain it without sounding irrational: it’s september, and i’m bracing for impact.

it is just a month. thirty perfectly reasonable number of calendar days, with no known capacity for personal vendettas. it’s certainly not plotting my accidental murder by waking me up on the first of the month to say:

right, time to ruin this woman’s entire life!

yet, somewhere deep inside my consciousness, september carries a certain feeling of warning to me.

it’s the same feeling you get when you’re out at night and the air feels humid, and sticky on your skin; when you look up and there’s a dark cloud hanging over the moon, swallowing whatever little light the sky has left, and not a single constellation in sight to figure out whether that particular cluster of stars is the big dipper or the tres marias.

you just know.

you know it so deeply in your bones that you start mentally preparing for the inevitable. you begin calculating whether you have enough time to get home without getting drenched. you start fighting to death with other commuters for a jeepney before the incoming rain turns the entire street into the filming location of the remake of titanic. you know that if you wait for five minutes longer, you’ll be standing helplessly beneath a street food vendor’s giant umbrella, watching the rain come down and ruin your white sneakers like the heavens have something against you personally.

sadly, you’ll never be able to convince me that it’s just some month because whenever september rolls around, some small deeply unreasonable part of me quietly goes:

for filipinos, the month is practically a national announcement that christmas is upon us, nevermind the fact that the calendar insists that there’s still about a few months to go.

the moment the calendar flips to september, it’s like the entire country collectively develops amnesia about the existence of october and november. suddenly, there’s christmas lights being wrapped around plastic trees, parols makes their way onto the streets and windows, shopping centers are becoming increasingly aggressive about their holiday decorations— the more that it looks as though santa threw up all over the place, the better— and there’s a new Christmas station ID to look forward to.

kalag-kalag (“undas”, or the observance of the all saints’ say and all souls’ day) never stood a chance because we have ultimately decided that the dead can absolutely wait, and christmas cannot.

it’s ber months, which technically means that it is the beginning of the end. the year starts quietly folding itself away, one month a time; the events of january suddenly feels like it happened in another lifetime, the resolutions we were so convinced we would keep are either long forgotten or have become things that we would pretend to accomplish again on the following year, because apparently once you reach september, it is simply too late to become the person you promised to be in january.

it’s so wonderfully and beautifully ridiculous: half of the time something could be falling apart and our grand solution is to put up christmas lights. or, we make parols out of scrap materials, then hold a competition where the most creative parol wins the prize money that sometimes doesn’t even amount to the labor spent on making the damn thing.

it’s incredibly human.

we know the year is ending, so we decorate, we know the days are getting shorter, so we put lights up, and we know everything passes so we gather our people around a table to eat together.

we know that things do not last forever, so we make an effort on making them pretty while they’re still here, so that when they’re needed to leave, they can leave a mark.

september has such a strange way of making even the endings so beautiful… and maybe that’s why it has always felt so unsettling.

how cruelly true that time does not wait for anyone, because while most people would celebrate september as the beginning of christmas season, i often see an ending quietly slipping through my fingers. another season passing; another collection of ordinary days becoming memories before i even had the chance to decide which ones i want to keep.

time does not wait for someone’s appreciation before it becomes something that only one can remember.

i think about this more than i’d like to admit, because september is also my birth month and the only thing that i like about that is that it gave me the hottest sun sign one could have: a libra.

everything else? cursed.

that is to say, since my adulthood, i have never made peace with my birthday. instead, i have cried on almost every birthday i can remember, which is, frankly, an embarrassing tradition to have accidentally established for myself. most people blow out their candles and make wishes; some people, like me, blow out the snot from their nose and enter an existential crisis.

…it would be funny if it weren’t so painfully consistent.

it doesn’t even make sense because sometimes, there’s nothing even remotely tragic happening. my family is there. my friends are there. people send their well-wishes. there is love, sometimes, in overwhelming quantities sitting right in front of me and still, something inside me aches.

when you’re young, you’re taught that life is precious that’s why you have be grateful on your birthdays because you’ve been given a gift of another year in your life. lately, it has become difficult to be thankful about it when every september has just become the universe’s excuse to make me confront the things i’ve successfully dodged over the past year. another year has passed. another year has been lived. another year is gone. the cycle of life. and, suddenly, i am standing in front of myself with a year’s worth of questions that i would rather much leave unanswered.

is this who i thought i would be by now?

did i do enough?

did i become enough?

where did all that time go?

how do i go further from here?

when i remember what age i’m supposed to be, i feel this sudden dissociation, as if my soul have separated from my physical body. a form needing to be filled up, and i actually have to double take because those numbers can’t possibly be mine.

it feels as though somewhere along the way, i missed a meeting about adulthood because surely someone was supposed to be handing me some sort of manual this is how you’re supposed to be when you reach this certain age. here is the stuff that you should have figured out by now alone. as you can see in this section, this is the appropriate amount of confidence, wisdom, stability, and emotional regulation required to survive adulthood— instead, i’m here.

i’ve always thought i’d have time to figure things out; do the things i wanted to do, to become someone, to eventually arrive at some variant of myself that feels whole. but, you could have all the time in the world, and yet still fail to become the person you’ve ever wanted to be. people like me don’t have the luxury of thinking that time is an infinite resource.

sometimes, life does feels like a race. not against another person, necessarily, but against the version of yourself you thought you would become by now. and, every september, i am reminded of just how far i feel from the life i thought i would be living now. how utterly embarrassing to realize how far behind i am in the race against my own life.

time keeps moving despite you being unready to move on with it. and, all you need to do is to at least try to match its pace.

whenever i start hearing the lyrics ‘whenever i see girls and boys…’ playing during commute, i’m reminded that september has arrived. the year gets older; and, against all odds, so do i.

there will always be some imaginary version of myself who only exists in my head, one who has somehow managed to make all things right in accordance to my own definition of what that word means and looks like. i often tend to look at the distance between us and wonder what went wrong.

but, the truth is, she does not exist and has never once existed.

i made her up, gave her a timeline, then spent years feeling like a failure for not keeping up with it.

life, however, does not always come with corresponding increase in certainty. you don’t wake up on your birthday with the sudden understanding of taxes, relationships, careers, purpose, or what the hell you’re supposed to do with the rest of your life. there is no morning when you wake up and suddenly recognize yourself as the person you were supposed to become; there is only this strange, continuous process of making decisions and choices with incomplete information and hoping either for the best or becoming wiser from the consequence.

we’re all just improvising here, aren’t we?

it doesn’t mean, however, that we get to stop caring for the things we haven’t done yet. i still have the places i want to go, things i want to accomplish and make, and the kind of all-consuming, gentle love that i deserve and want for myself. despite everything, i still get so impatient, still look at the years behind me, and wonder what could i have done differently.

i’m trying not to look at september asking whether i have done enough to justify living it because everyday should count, even the ordinary days— especially the ordinary days. the banal moments, the meaningless conversations, the time spent bed rotting than doing something productive, the commutes where nothing particularly happens… the filler scenes between important things.

but, what if there are no filler scenes? what if we have only been taught to think that life only counts when something important is happening in it?

i think what frightens me about september so much is that it’s a reminder of the inevitably of the passage of time. i have been waiting for my life to properly begin, as if there’s some future version of myself who will finally become interesting enough, accomplished enough, certain enough to be deserving to be called alive. i keep thinking that the real story would start once i have figured everything out.

but, what if this is the story?

what if these are the good years?

i don’t want to be so afraid of losing my life, that i forget to actually live it; because, what if life, afterall, isn’t made up of the grand occasions? what if it’s made up of days that look unremarkable while you’re living them? what if life only becomes meaningful when you were present enough to experience it?

sure, after the shit i’ve been through this year, and the many god, i am not your strongest soldier situations— i could make a convincing argument that the universe owes me a lot. i’m owed so many things, but i also owe myself something.

i owe myself the permission to just be here.

i owe september the chance to be lived while it’s still happening, instead of grieving it in advance.

putting up christmas decorations on september is so absurdly optimistic.

imagine, there’s still so many months left before the actual holiday itself, and more days before 2026 ends. still so many deadlines left, people to meet, problems to solve, and bad days to survive; yet, someone had already decided to hang a string of christmas lights outside their house. god forbid, someone is already belting to mariah carey’s all i want for christmas is you.

for supposedly being a single day of commemoration, we stretch the celebration into an entire season. months of christmas songs, parols, lights, reunions, manitos and manitas, and countdowns for one holiday that the rest of the world thinks is still far away enough to ignore.

there’s several important things i’ve had to learn about the culture surrounding that.

we know everything is temporary, so we try to make everything last. we lengthen one holiday into months. we keep the christmas decors up a little longer. we try to make things stay here longer before they’re needed to leave; it’s as though we understand the passage of time so well that we try to put a certain amount of value to it as much as we can.

the point of knowing that something will end is not to spend its entire duration preparing for the ending, but to make most of the fact that it’s here both happening and becoming.

we can’t keep even the things we love so dearly forever, so we create rituals around the things we want to remember. we give ordinary days names and traditions. we attach songs to memories, take pictures of meals, keep old receipts, terrible photographs, and even other completely useless things because, somehow, throwing them away feels too much like admitting that the moment they belonged to is gone.

we are always leaving little evidences of something’s existence behind.

i was here. this happened. this mattered to me.

i was born on the month of being caught between things. summer giving away to the beginning of the closing of the year. in our country, christmas has already arrived early. it is a month about endings without being entirely about them, a month that stands somewhere between what has already passed and what has not yet come. it is the beginning of the end, yes, but it’s also everything that still exists before the ending.

despite how the cold air feels, there is still time left.

september is not december, so technically, the year is not over. the lights are already up, but there are still months left between here and there. there is sill something to do in between.

the days don’t suddenly become less valuable because there are fewer of them left. the world keeps moving without demanding that every moment be understood before it passes. september can carry the weight of an ending without becoming the ending itself. not every dark cloud is a catastrophe. sometimes it is only a dark cloud. sometimes the rain comes. sometimes it doesn’t. sometimes your overpriced, beloved white sneakers gets fucked up; and, the only thing to do is keep walking hoping that leptospirosis doesn’t get the best of you.

so, let september arrive with all its warnings.

let the air grow heavy. let the clouds gather over the moon. let the christmas lights come out absurdly early, bright against a year that is nowhere near finished.

there is no need to outrun the month.

there is no need to mourn december while it is still september. there is no need to a mourn a life that is already happening right in front of you.

the year will end when it ends.

the birthday will come and go, the seasons will change, the christmas lights will eventually go down, and the decorations will be tucked away. another year will arrive, shedding off last year’s utter fuckery into another september that will come around, and once again torture me because another year has passed in my life.

predictably, some small, deeply traumatized part of me will still whisper:

ah shit, here we go again.

then again, it’s still september and there’s still something to do in between.

happy september!

-ella.

every few business days, i develop a new five-year plan. and, on this week’s revision, it seems as though i’ve finally evolved to my final form of delulu by wishing i’d become an insanely accomplished woman in STEM.

it’s not just any woman in STEM, too. no. i’m talking published research and international conferences kind of successful woman in STEM. oh, i’m talking about the “sorry, i can’t make it, i’m in switzerland discussing something incomprehensible involving molecular biology”.

i’m talking about that terrifying species of woman who wears sensible cuffed sleeves and somehow knows how taxes work in multiple countries because she’s been in one and in another for enough time to know.

i want to be the kind of woman who accidentally pays for everyone’s dinner because it’s genuinely easier than splitting the bill. the “don’t worry ma, ako na” final boss. the rich tita from abroad limited edition DLC. i want to be the kind of woman who flies back to the Philippines for a visit once every december, carrying two checked suitcases, seventeen Costco-sized chocolates, and enough foreign currency to probably alert the local economy.

the one whom you recall who somehow always smells and looks expensive.

a woman so amazingly intelligent that when someone asks “can someone explain this?” people would slowly turn their heads towards me like i’m the oracle of delphi.

she’s probably so financially literate that all of her assets diversified. better yet, her CV’s so good it makes every HR recruiter salivate.

i want that.

DESPERATELY.

i want to become so financially stable that my first instinct during emergencies isn’t…

ohmygodohmygodohmygod—

it’s

hm. that’s weird. anyway.

then, pays for it. just like that.

like, god, yes, i would love to be the healthcare worker daughter from a third-world country who actually escaped this cruel simulation.

BUT THEN.

(and here’s where things become almost clinically embarrassing).

sometimes, especially when i’m in the middle of a toxic work shift contemplating whether my daily wage compensates the utter fuckery i’m going through, i spend an alarming amount of time fantasizing about owning a tiny matcha slowbar which overall losses could amount to approximately 100,000 pesos every month… almost consistently, and completely aggressively that if accountants were to see my financial statements, they’d probably start praying.

i imagine that the café would have six, or seven seats max, plays soft r&bs because it’s vibe-y. on the shelves are vinyls i’d pretend to collect over the years, on some side table a typewriter is displayed but no one actually uses it because it’s non-functional, and another shelf is labelled “books that changed my life” but the books are just actually gathering dust because no one actually picks them up for reading.

we’d only sell matcha, and hojicha. if you’re lucky enough, you get to purchase the only cookie we sell.

customers would probably ask stuff like, “can i get iced americano?”, or “do you have wifi?”, or “can i charge my laptop?”, and i’ll answer all of them with a ‘no🤍’.

you get the point, right?

financially, this establishment should have been euthanized months ago. it should have never escaped the blueprint. which, of course, brings me to the truly unhinged part of this fantasy.

because in my head, it doesn’t matter.

why?

because somewhere out there is my partner who looks at the monthly losses. then, looks at me. then, back to the spreadsheet. then, sighs. i imagine our conversation would go like this:

“babe.”

“yeah?”

“you lost another hundred thousand.”

“i know.”

“…did you have fun atleast?”

“absolutely.”

“okay.”

?????

THAT’S IT.

THAT’S THE CONVERSATION.

LIKE???

HELLO???

WHO LET THIS FANTASY INTO MY BRAIN???

because what do you mean my greatest aspiration in life is simultaneously becoming a woman so terrifyingly competent and financially independent that she could support three generations of her bloodline… while also wanting someone to gently tell her,

“don’t worry about it, sweetheart. go buy another ceremonial-grade matcha powder from japan.”

am i… confused? a hypocrite? a victim of capitalism? a feminist? delusional? my venus in leo talking?

is it… all of the above?

who’s to say.

my brain has evolved beyond reasonable human ambition because now i just don’t want a career, but i want the career pro max 1TB fully paid. specifically… i want to be able to cure, or atleast help cure diseases before lunch. i want my email signature to contain enough letters after my name to qualify as another sentence. i want to buy my family a house. i want to fund my nephews and nieces’ education.

i want to be able to look at every person i love and know that if they fall, i can catch them.

and, well, somehow…

in fact, simultaneously to that…

i also want to spend tuesday afternoons visiting tiny shops, looking at ceramic and hand-painted chawans, while my partner says,

“take your time, love.”

excuse me???

where did this disney princess software update come from???

it’s funny because most of the time, society makes you choose either to be a boss b*tch or soft life pretty princess<33.

the dream is either you’re waking up at 5AM, optimizing your morning routine, tracking macros, listening to podcasts at 2x speed, and replacing joy with productivity… or, you’re wearing silk dresses in tuscany eating grapes that your rich partner imported directly from somewhere mysterious, probably mars.

choose your fighter.

meanwhile, i’m standing in character selection raising my hand asking if i can do multiclass.

because… i don’t think i actually want total dependence. i would never. my ego wouldn’t be able to swallow it. what i want, instead, is insurance. the kind where if life suddenly body-slams both of us to the pavement, the other person can say, “i got it.”

sometimes it’s me. sometimes it’s them.

isn’t that the point?

i’ve never dreamed about someone rescuing me because i can’t survive on my own.

i dream about being so capable that i never need rescuing, and then opening my heart to someone who says, “cool. i’m still going to take care of you anyway.”

i think the important distinction here is that the fantasy isn’t being provided for, it’s being safe is. it’s being able to rest.

just imagine having someone witness how hard you’ve worked your whole life, and gently tell you that you don’t have to earn your right to be loved by being useful. love is not something that you have to earn, after all.

what’s funny is that in both versions of wanting, it’s just me chasing the exact same thing. the woman in STEM version of me has never wanted prestige, only freedom. and, the café owner version doesn’t actually want luxury, only peace.

they’re the same woman.

at the end of the day, if i’m being truthful, i don’t actually care whether i’m wearing a lab coat or an apron dusted with matcha powder.

i just want a life where i can breathe; a life where the people i love never have to wonder if they’ll be okay, where money exists in the background instead of starring as the main antagonist, where work fulfills me instead of consuming me, and where ambition and softness aren’t enemies in which picking one would make you look weak.

so, what do you call someone who wants to be the ultimate and final evolution of gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss… but, also wants to be someone’s babygirl?

someone who wants to publish groundbreaking research, and also wants her biggest problem to be deciding if whether today’s special should be the ube matcha or hojicha?

someone who wants to become rich enough to provide, while secretly hoping someone else says, “actually, let me take care of this one.”?

it’s either we don’t have a word for it, or we’ve been using the wrong ones. or, maybe it’s just me refusing to believe that i can only pick one dream in my lifetime.

so, if in twenty years, you happen to find me wearing a cardigan in a tiny café that has been there for some time now but somehow still hasn’t turned a profit… please don’t ask me how the business is doing.

ask my partner.

they’re handling the finances.

i’m busy perfecting my ube matcha recipe and pretending that i’m writing the next greatest novel of all time.

according to whom? based on what data? please cite your sources.

this, i imagine, is very exhausting for everyone involved.

there is something so deeply, and hilariously unfortunate with the way i receive compliments, which is to say, i receive them less as gifts, and more like as research proposals. instead of accepting it with the grace and ease that most socially adjusted people would, my brain would immediately convene with its ethics committee.

i promise, i’m not trying to be difficult… well, atleast not consciously.

one of the many consequences of spending a lifetime believing that words ought to carry their own weight is that i have never been good with accepting conclusions without examining the evidence first. as so, compliments to me have always felt like the beginning of an argument, one that needed to clearly end with something tangible. in a debate, if one makes a claim, the claim should already arrive carrying its own explanation — what makes a winning debater is that their arguments should already answer the because even without prompting from the other party.

in other words, i don’t want a praise that merely gets suspended in the air. i want something that lands and makes a point.

sure, “you’re beautiful” is a sentence.

but, why?

it is one of the smallest question in the English language, and somehow the one that has followed me the longest. perhaps, because beauty has always struck as me as one of the least reliable currencies to trade in. beauty fluctuates. beauty depends. beauty bends itself around preference, culture, timing, lighting, symmetry, fashion, and whatever particular face someone happened to fall in love with before they met yours.

beauty is astonishingly democratic in its inconsistencies; literally everyone has a different definition and standard, and somehow we still speak about it as though it were measurable.

someone somewhere will always find you beautiful. someone else won’t even notice you. personally, neither observation tells me very much.

growing up, i’ve never actually belonged to the category of girls who moved through the world with quiet confidence from believing that they were lovely. i never looked into mirrors and found certainty waiting for me there. mirrors, i learned early, were sometimes poor scribes because they reflected appearances truthfully enough, but they never seemed interested in recording the things that actually felt like me.

so, i found most of my time investing elsewhere.

since my mind was the only thing i could trust, my thoughts were never without effort. it was built through question by questions, book by books, conversation by conversations, and even hour after hours spent laying on my bed awake because my thoughts were unwilling to let me sleep. it was the only thing that stayed with me even after bad haircuts, awkward photographs, teenage insecurities, and all the odd things that comes with having a physical appearance that made you often convince yourself that your worth has absolutely nothing to do with whatever you look like.

naturally, when someone tells me i’m pretty, i hear the unfortunate ending.

objection, your honor. the witness has provided a conclusion without sufficient supporting evidence.

but, when someone tells me that they like the way i think…

court adjourned.

case dismissed.

we’re done here.

to me, there is nothing more intimate than someone noticing the architecture of another person’s mind. it’s not intelligence, no, not exactly. it sounds too polished, smooth by overuse, and so broad that it risks meaning almost nothing at all; what i mean is the particularities — the strange habits of thought that make a person unmistakably themselves.

tell me that you’ve noticed that i always consider all options, giving each one the similar equal thought, and less because i’m indecisive, but more of because i believe in each one’s possibility, even when one clearly isn’t the right one.

or, that you’ve seen the way i get satisfied whenever i put two previously, seemingly unrelated ideas together and discover entirely by accident that they belonged together all along.

or, that you enjoy watching me disappear down rabbit holes that began with one innocent question, and somehow ended in philosophy, history, astrophysics, scientific, spiritual, or the saturn retrograde…

please tell me my curiosity has gravity. do wonder why my questions linger after conversations have ended. confess to me that i make you reconsider things you believed were already settled…

oh, won’t you tell me that there is something so beautiful — not about my face — but about the way i arrive at conclusions.

and, if you tell me i have depth… well, forgive me, because that’s practically courtship. at that point, i’m probably already mentally evaluating the seating arrangement for our hypothetical wedding.

which is, admittedly, dramatic.

but, depth has always felt like the rarest compliment a person could ever get simply because you cannot recognize it from across the room, nor can you see it from just a mere photograph, neither can you even infer it from a passing glance.

depth, i think, requires staying. in order to discover someone’s depth, you must listen long enough for someone to reveal the shape of their world. so, you see? depth asks something of the observer. attention. patience. curiosity. it demands that another person resists the temptation of easy and convenient conclusions.

overall, i think that’s what honestly moves me so profoundly. it’s not truly the compliment itself, but the effort and devotion preceding it…

so, you know, it has actually occurred to me on more than one occasion, that i must be an extraordinarily troublesome person to love because i require someone’s admiration with an entire review of related literature written in APA style attached to it.

like, imagine some poor soul looking into my eyes, with complete sincerity, saying with all the adoration and goodness in their heart, “i love you.” and instead of melting into the moment like every romantic film has taught us to do, i have the actual gall to make a face and respond with something catastrophically on-brand.

“that’s wonderful, honey.” a pause, “now, expound on your argument.”

it’s difficult to deny a person’s intention; but it’s more of a challenge for me to win over the demons holding me captive over something so unnecessary such as someone’s usage of language.

it’s strange for someone who claims to be such a fool for words, a poet who weaves constellations into the hems of ordinary people, to have such a complicated relationship with it when it’s directed to me.

words are fickle things because people can say forever, until forever becomes something inconvenient. in the same way, people can say “beautiful” as a word that arrives as something already rehearsed, but still in the end, it asks nothing further of the speaker.

of course, it’s easy to think that you’ve immortalize people into your words, but it’s also so incredibly easy to say things for what it is, rather than what they actually mean, or rather than the weight that they actually carry.

but, god, if you tell me you love me — if you can just articulate the invisible things, the habits, the patterns, the weird little mechanism of thought that have made me so precious to you — then, your affection already has substance and even texture.

your love, to me, is tangible. it has fingerprints. it becomes so uniquely mine. someone could find me pretty, but, only someone who has truly seen me could say things like: “i love the way your mind refuses simplicity”, or, “i admire how seriously you take ideas”, or, “you have a way of making conversations feel unfinished in the best possible way, because i leave them still thinking about it.”

it’s sad sometimes to think that i’ve built such an elaborate system for verifying affection, only because i’ve become suspicious of anything seemingly beautiful that can’t explain itself. i often tell myself that it’s mainly the reason why i only accept compliments that have precision and specificity attached to them, ultimately forgetting that love was never supposed to go through these cross-examinations.

i don’t know even know why i do that.

but, what i do know is this: if you tell me i’m beautiful, i’ll probably thank you (all while trying my best to hide that disgusted expression).

but, if you tell me i think beautifully… i’ll remember it for years.

which is, suppose, either a testament to the kind of person i am… or maybe a cry for help.

jury’s still out.

…and, this exact sentence that would have put my 13-year self to a coma.

back then, (keywords are: BACK THEN), and before i had come to the emerald green and silver light to find salvation through the one and only savior, and founder, salazar slytherin, yes, like a cult; i was a gryffindor apologist through and through in the way dramatic and nerdy teenagers were: argumentative, irrational, loud, in a way that carried no moral certainty of someone who never paid taxes.

i believed that harry potter could do nothing wrong, and held on to the absolute fact that draco malfoy could do nothing right. these were, frankly, the aphorisms i lived by. case in point, if you had asked the teen version of me what slytherin represented, i would have definitely answered with full confidence: blond rich boys, with daddy issues, and has the unhealthiest habits of joining fascist movements.

so, naturally, when i took the sorting hat quiz for the first time — i approached it with the integrity of every politician in this goddamn country (guess which one).

simply: absolutely none at all. nada.

every question became a game of deduction. in my mind, i would ask which choice sounded brave, or which one sounded too suspiciously noble, until i’ve inevitably came up with a clever WWDMD (What Would Draco Malfoy Do?) system that helped me avoid at all cost the choices that immediately rang the alarm bells in my head.

at that point, i should have already known that i would be sorted to slytherin. still, if there was an option that practically shouted ambition, Draco Malfoy and the dark lord written across its forehead in the same ink of the dark mark, i swerved away from it like it carried the dragon pox.

i could want ravenclaw. (imagine answering riddles every single time you try to enter the common room. i would, unfortunately, get locked out everyday.)

i’d pretty much settle for hufflepuff. (imagine being close to the kitchen. i’d, for sure, camp with the house-elves.)

i would have accepted gryffindor with the humility of someone receiving a Nobel Prize.

so, imagine the betrayal i felt when the screen glowed green, anyway.

god, apparently, had favorites and i’m none of them.

there wasn’t even much fanfare, just the immediate condemnation of the Sorting Hat barely brushing my hair before giving me a life sentence. i imagine that conniving hat would have smiled like a Cheshire before yelling, ‘i know exactly what your problem is.’

i stared at the laptop in disbelief.

the sorting… computer had cursed me with Draco Malfoy’s house.

i remember spiraling into what can only be described as the most unnecessary crash-out of my entire adolescence.

am i…evil?

before you cast your proverbial Avada Kadevra on me, do come back to first line of this entire thing… because, yes, i know.

i know slytherin has more layers to them than what the 2000s something internet gave it credit for. i’m certainly aware that not every slytherin became a Dark Lord, or a Dark Lord’s enthusiastic fan account. there was andromeda tonks, whom we know chose love (and, so much more) than blood purity. there was even merlin himself, arguably the greatest wizard of all time, whom the harry potter wizarding lore community insists was a slytherin. there were countless decent people who simply happened to value a bunch of other stuff a slytherin is known for over blind fanaticism and martyrdom.

but, as you know, nuance is wasted on a 13-year old.

when you’re at that age, the world exists not in black and white. but, in primary and secondary colors: heroes wears scarlet, while the villains wear green.

the golden trio are your… countrymen; and somehow, through an online personality quiz, you’ve committed the most grievous treason.

at that point, it felt less like i was discovering something new about myself, but more like i was being informed that i have unknowingly joined the dark side and have become the new Nagini.

of course, the years would pass. i grew old enough to upgrade from a Draco Malfoy hater, to an i-would-marry-Draco-Malfoy-if-he-was-real phase. talk about character development. but, in all seriousness, somewhere between graduating, finding work, collecting responsibilities, discovering that adulthood is mostly crashing out before ultimately getting the job done, and realizing that dreams have actual invoices to them rather than just the fantasy of strolling through hogsmeade, i took the sorting hat quiz again.

several, in fact.

strange thing is that for most people, whenever they take a personality quiz on different stages of their life, they often get different answers as well; but, that was never the case for me for this one particular quiz.

the result had always been slytherin.

eventually, i had to stop treating it like a bug in the system and, instead accepted as the uncomfortable truth simply because the older i became, the more i understood that the sorting hat had never been telling me who i wanted to be — it was telling me what i valued the most.

and, in the most selfish way, i wanted things. in fact, i harbored an unreasonable amount of hope for my future.

i want to write books whose lines you’d underline twice with a red pen.

i want to become exceptional at the work i do.

i want my mom to retire comfortably, and to return my sister’s kindness for everything that she’s provided for the family.

i want my name to mean something after i’m gone.

i want enough money to stop calculating whether i deserve even the smallest luxuries.

i want to become someone that my younger self would’ve looked at with absolute awe.

there is, admittedly, so much that i want for myself that i sometimes wonder whether my soul has mistaken life for a checklist. i often feel that if each these metaphorical boxes hasn’t been marked, i would never be satisfied. i’d be on my deathbed regretting it all.

in the book, as the sorting hat was atop harry potter’s head, it whispered to him: ‘you could be great, you know. it’s all here in your head. and slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that.’

when i was younger, it was easy to mistake greatness for glory. now, it just sort-of feels like responsibility.

ambition is a peculiar thing.

we romanticize it as something like waking up at five in the morning, drinking expensive matcha or coffee, color-coding planners, or posting motivational quotes over sunsets.

in reality, ambition is far less aesthetic.

it’s rewriting a paragraph atleast thirty times because you know so well that you can do so much better.

it’s looking at your current life with gratitude while simultaneously believing that it can’t be the final version.

it’s loving who you are while refusing to stay that way.

i think slytherin’s greatest strength has always been its greatest weakness too because look at how tom riddle turned out. of course, the house prizes ambition because it moves the world. it builds businesses, discovers medicine, creates art, and changes history. however, if left unattended, ambition also has an alarming tendency to eat the person carrying it.

ambition makes you think that your every achievement is just a stepping stone to the next. you start thinking that once you feel satisfied, it means you’ve started to get lazy. you begin equating your worth a version of you that might not even exist in the future.

you become someone who’s yet to arrive at something and never realize that you already have.

i think that’s the reason why so many of the fictional slytherin in the series took a fall. i don’t think it’s entirely because there’s something cursed in that house that turns them into something evil, but it’s maybe because ambition without something soft besides it only becomes hunger.

a hungry person never truly understands the word enough.

of course, every hogwarts house is a tragedy in its own. gryffindors may often confuse recklessness for courage. ravenclaws may mistake intelligence for identity. hufflepuffs may even conflate selflessness for obligation. and, slytherins?

well, slytherins have the most fatal tendency of thinking that the only way to be is to become.

we become so focused with the next and better versions of ourselves that we forget to be kind to our current selves who’s trying their very best.

i fear that the being too ambitious may mean spending your entire life chasing the horizon that’s so out of reach, not knowing that you’re already in one of those.

still, there’s something so beautiful about people who continue walking anyway; not because they believe they’ll conquer the horizon, but because more often than not, the walking changes them.

i don’t think the sorting computer actually planned to ruin my teens just so it could predict my future by placing me in slytherin. i’d rather think that it was issuing me some kind of forewarning…

you will want many things.

some of them will make you.

some of them will inevitably unmake you.

your greatest gift and greatest temptation will wear the same face.

so, be ambitious.

dream of impossible things.

build a life that your younger self would fawn over.

just don’t forget that even the most magnificent castles need foundations deeper than achievement.

otherwise one day you’ll reach greatness, and discover that you left yourself somewhere on the way there.

hi, thanks for reading!

been trying to write more these days, and also trying out different writing styles. i was struck so suddenly with the memory of my younger self who was so into hogwarts lore. i couldn’t help myself, so i resurrected my teenage niche for this one :D

this is for all the slytherin girlies ♡ (and all the potterhead girlies, really)

-ella.

swear that you will carry every shard of this broken glass gently.

oh, i’m well aware that broken glass isn’t as beautiful in the typical way that most people perceive beauty. a broken glass may catch light in strange ways. in a poetic sense, every shard is proof of the impact that made it what it is. these fragments harbor the memory of the fall, but no matter how fractured, it’s still meant to be carried so carefully, or risk a cut.

in the simplest way: lover, i don’t need you to become a miracle worker.

i don’t need you to spend your days looking for proof that some crack once existed as a whole just to understand me. i would never ask you to keep on kneeling upon a wreckage that you didn’t create yourself. i assure you, i will never be so desperate to ask you to fix something you didn’t break.

my heart is not a labor that you must carry.

but, i do, however, ask that when you find those pieces, please don’t mistake its sharpness as an excuse to be careless.

because i do not want to be the reason that you bleed just because i have.

you do not have to bleed in the same way i did.

so, then, if i gave you these shards, will you hold them the way the cold holds captive and bare, before finally the warmth dawns upon?

will you cradle them the way the sea inevitably becomes home for abandoned bottles, their corners turning softer and softer after eons of persevering tides?

will you carry them the way one does to an old letter whose paper has grown brittle from rereading, deeply aware that love can be teared just as easily by heavy hands?

despite how jagged, every shard will always be a part of me.

so, if you decide to love me, you must remember that even the most minuscule splinter still bears weight, or you might overlook every piece that once carried laughter, the sharp corners that once knew how to trust, and the translucent sliver tucked quietly beneath carrying a reminder of every younger and hopeful version of me that believed permanence was a sure thing, instead of a beginning of a punchline.

lover, please don’t ask them to become anything other than what they are.

if they tremble, let them.

if they catch light in the strangest way, leave them be.

if they cut, then it’s only because they were taught that the only way to keep on living is to become roughened. i beg of you not to punish them for the only way they could see through survival.

instead, will you be so kind to please let them rest in your hands without fear?

i must admit, this softness did not come to me until i’ve become acquainted with the art of shattering so, if i ever choose to place the ruins of myself before you, know that it is the closest thing i have to faith.

and, faith is frightening, isn’t it?

it’s opening a fist that has spent many seasons believing that it needs to stay close so the skin inside doesn’t scorch.

or, trusting another pair of hands even when the aftermath of the storm is permanently seared at the back of the mind.

or, accepting the possibility that being witnessed will not end up as another brutal kind of wound.

you don’t have to make your own hands bleed from trying to put me back together.

i know now, for certain, that love is not measured by how much pain it’s willing to endure because it’s entirely enough for me that you know not to close your hand around something that’s fragile. love could simply just be the quiet knowledge that shattered things can still be held so softly, even without trying to force them into a shape and form that isn’t their own.

maybe our love can simply become a place where an already cracked glass wouldn’t have to carry the eternal fear of being dropped once more.

i’m not some damsel who’s begging for a prince or a knight to rescue her, nor am i asking you to suddenly turn into bob the builder and repair what’s broken. no, i don’t need that. but, i only ask that, for a little while, that you hold every tiny, scattered, and sharp pieces of me with the kind of gentleness that understands, without ever demanding any more.

this is all i am. this is all that i have.

for even in missing pieces, lover, you must know that this is my heart, and all that encompasses it; and, i leave it all to you in hopes that you still carry it, in all of what it remains in capacity.

it is destitution carved and etched within the marrow of my bones; a pulpit built from the empty altar of an idol, forever waiting for a song of devotion to fill it with something holy. it does not crave for bread, not the longing of warmth, nor the simplest of mercies that keeps a heart alive. every dawn mistakes itself for sustenance, and every night swallows it whole, reminding the day that it was never anything more than just imitation.

and, there is a thirst.

the gods know how many rivers i have knelt by their banks, filling my palms with salt and seawater, swallowing it down, searching for something, and anything that might satiate what has become of me. yet, every sip merely teaches my tongue the cruelty of deprivation.

for nothing, nothing at all, can taste like you.

(no one, no one is quite like you.)

if desire is a sin, then you are my most grievous transgression.

oh, let the saints recoil in their glory, let the ancestors hold their tongues in shame at the utterance of my name, dishonor on this heathen, that i may be condemned by the very heavens to purgatory. i would rather have my soul damned than severed from the gravity that pulls every fraction of my being to your orbit. for what is ruin, truly, if not an eternity of longing? and, what is absolution, if not finding it reflected back in your gaze?

my soul has never belonged to my body.

(it has always belonged to you.)

it left me the moment that i laid my eyes on yours and found myself drowning in the infinite depths of your gaze; twin oceans to swallow the certainties that once were my entire world. ever since then my soul has wandered the shores of your existence, a pilgrim upon the sands, only praying for chance to fall into your waters and be done with it all.

i will drink without hesitation from your depths and, know that it is the first honest thing i have ever done.

there are hungers that cannot be appeased, and thirsts that cannot be drowned. there are names that are scriptures when spoken out loud into the wind, that become manifestos etched upon the surface of reality. there are loves that are universes unto themselves, that unmake the civilizations that dare to hold them in their chests, in their ribs, in their palms.

you are all of mine.

you are everything i am, and everything i lack.

the famine, and the flood. the sacrilege, and the miracle. the holy, and the damned.

if the heavens require me to wander on an empty stomach and a parched tongue, let it be so. for i have tasted the divine, and everything else is ash. and, the wells that remain are left in dust; emptied and hollow.

today, i watched myself get buried.

and, unfortunately, truly how fitting that no procession arrived.

instead, the afternoon continued with the indifference only daylight possesses. the trees rehearsed their shadows upon the ground. the wind carried away another fistful of leaves without asking which branch they had once belonged to. somewhere, a bird persisted in singing, unaware that there are elegies so quiet that they disguise themselves as ordinary days.

only the earth understood.

it did not open itself for flesh, but for a season that had exhausted every flower it knew how to bloom.

i have been quite acquainted, as of recent, that the most irreversible departures are never announced. nothing shatters, nor catches fire. instead, the cathedral remains standing long after the congregation has forgotten the road leading to it. the bells do not crack; they simply grow unfamiliar with their own echo.

one day, the prayers stop arriving. some other time, no one notices.

there was such a lovely time when everything carried another meaning beneath its own. rain did not fall, it remembered. the moon was less a celestial body than a wound the night refused to let scar. every river seemed to know a secret about returning.

every silence was only the language of kneeling.

the world once approached me clothed both in kind and cruel metaphors, and i learned to answer each one in the same tongue.

these days, the rain simply has become weather. the moon has accepted astronomy. the river arrives only as water.

nothing asks to be immortalized anymore.

or maybe, i only learned, that there is no one left within me who insists that it must.

it is both a strange and beautiful thing, surviving the disappearance of the one who taught the eyes to see beyond the visible.

the face remains, and so as the pulse that continues its faithful labor.

the morning continues to remember the window where light enters.

yet, somewhere between one reflection and the next, an entire alphabet has quietly misplaced its vowels. words rearrange themselves, like flowers pressed between the pages of a forgotten book — still beautiful, still intact, but no longer carrying the fragrance of the field they came from.

i used to think forgetting was the opposite of remembrance. now, i suspect they are longtime roommates. one locks the door, while other keeps the key.

there are old cemeteries where the names have nearly surrendered themselves to the overgrown. the dates soften beneath rain. the stone begins speaking the language of ruins instead of history. yet, even when no one remembers the face beneath the earth, the marker remains, insisting — with all the quiet dignity of granite — that someone once stood here long enough to cast a shadow.

i think every life leaves such a monument within itself. it’s not truly and always a place of mourning, but more often, a place of witness.

somewhere beyond reach, there stands a weathered stone bearing a name i no longer answer to, yet continue to recognize.

the path leading there grows verdant. ivy, it seems, has become fluent in the inscriptions. the seasons have passed over it so many times that even the wind lowers its voice when passing by.

still, it remains.

inside that silent enclosure rests an entire vocabulary that once believed language could outlive eternity. shelves of unwritten dawns and dusks. drawers swollen with unsent letters. wildflowers gathered that resembles broken promises.

entire skies translated into ink… every warmth and tenderness entrusted to a mere paper.

and, every sentence that reached toward another heartbeat as though language itself could become both hearth and home.

nothing, i confess, has truly been lost, only buried where the living no longer think to look.

often, i wonder whether monuments are built for the dead at all, or meant for those who will one day forget that they have survived.

maybe that stone is less a farewell, but more of a proof that these hands once carried spring wherever they wandered. or perhaps, evidence that these eyes once found constellations inside ordinary ceilings.

perhaps, a testament, that there existed a season in which every sunrise arrived wearing the first line of Erato’s song.

and yet, there is one future before which even stone cannot reassure me.

paths possess a quieter mortality than monuments.

leave them untouched long enough, and the grass begins speaking over them. the forest, with all its innocent persistence, folds every forgotten road back into itself until it becomes difficult to tell whether anyone had ever passed there, or that whether, there is a path to walk upon at all.

i fear that it is not the monument i will eventually lose.

i fear the way toward it.

that one morning, i will wake fluent only in what i see. that my hands, having finally learned not to reach, will pass by old cabinets without wondering what sleeps inside them. i fear for the uncertain certainty that blank pages will resemble only paper.

i am terrified of the day that silence will no longer sound inhabited.

and, that somewhere along the years, i will have become so practiced at protecting the wound that i will forget what brought it there in the first place. should that day arrive, i wonder what i will mourn more, the disappearance of the traveler, or the forgetting of the road.

i tell myself that the stone will remain patient beneath its weather. keeping safe the forgotten dialect carved into its surface. keeping every pressed flower between its pages.

every season that ever believed words could safeguard what it loved.

maybe, then, memory asks nothing more of us than this: not that we visit often, only that somewhere, beyond all the lives we must become, there remains a place that remembers our name even after we have forgotten how to pronounce it ourselves.

if stone remembers footprints carved by centuries of rain; if forests continue speaking through the rings hidden beneath their bark; if starlight survives the death of the stars that made it…

then, perhaps, no season vanishes completely; only the changes in the language through which it returns.

old cathedrals often remain standing centuries after the final prayer. the lush, unfortunately, inherits and crowds the altar. dust makes its home among the pews. the light continues pouring through stained glass as faithfully as it always has, though there is no one left to call it holy.

more times, it’s mistaken as abandonment. i wonder if it is only waiting, or perhaps, an awakening.

seeds spend entire winters perfecting the appearance of absence. the rivers disappear beneath mountains without ceasing to be itself.

the phoenix, if it exists at all, must first become indistinguishable from ash.

i think, certain parts of us obey the same quiet laws because there are things that are only roots practicing the patience of becoming.

when standing before the mirror these days, i often carry the uneasy feeling that reflections are historians.

it returns my face with unwavering accuracy, the same eyes, the same mouth, and the same geography of freckles and moles. yet, i find my gaze lingering anyway, as though searching behind my retinas an attestation of someone who used to translate light into scripture; who used to lasso entire celestial bodies from the heavens back into earth with nothing but pure will, and a lexicon of devotion translated.

i end up looking desperately for a shadow of someone who could not look at an empty chair without imagining the shape of longing seated there; one who believed that beauty was not found, but bestowed.

i’m not quite sure whether that figure has departed… or merely descended beyond sight.

when you bury something, often, it’s not the earth asking for an ending. sometimes, it only asks for safekeeping for there are things too fragile, too delicate, too precious to survive the weather above ground.

there are lines that become seeds, and languages that survive only by sleeping beneath stone.

there are, unfortunately, versions of ourselves that cannot walk beside us forever, yet refuse to disappear.

so, they wait in the quiet country beyond memory where aconites, poppies, and asters bloom over names no longer whispered. where every page i ever filled still breathes beneath the soil.

where every miraculous softness remains exactly as it was left unweathered, unfinished, and still faithfully facing east.

and, if one day i find myself wandering back to that forgotten place, brushing the dirt and grime from a familiar name, i hope i do not mistake the monument for a grave.

i hope i recognize it for what it has always been: not evidence that something ended, but proof that it once lived so completely, it left behind a language even time could not bury.

every path gained is also a path lost.

life is often described as a series of choices, but what we rarely acknowledge is that every decision carries a quiet sacrifice; to choose one thing is to give up another. every choice we make closes the door on countless others, and once that door shuts, it can never be opened in quite the same way again. we often celebrate decisions for what they bring us, the opportunities, relationships, and experiences they create, yet seldom pause to consider what they quietly take away. behind every “yes” exists a hundred unspoken “no”s and behind every life we build lies an infinite number of lives we leave behind.

homeostasis is the natural way of the body to keep a stable internal environment, a way to compromise with the ever-changing surrounding. the delicate act of balancing is inherent to us; something that nature teaches even to our bodies.

simply, there must be a balance to everything.

for every opportunity embraced, another is left behind; for every dream pursued, another fades into the background. dedicating ourselves to one ambition means withdrawing energy from another; remaining in one place means not being somewhere else. to love one version of our future often requires us to grieve another. our lives, it seems, is not only the accumulation of choices, but also the acceptance of their costs. we can be delusional all we want about desiring to be many things all at once; but, at the end of the day, we, unfortunately, cannot have everything; something— eventually, and always inevitably— has to give, even our bodies itself demands it.

maybe this is why making a choice feels so heavy because we understand, consciously or not, that every decision is also a form of leaving something behind. even when we think we chose correctly, even when we know we chose well, there is still loss involved. the existence of sacrifice does not mean we made the wrong choice; it only means we chose at all.

this truth somehow tends to follow us like a ghost throughout our lives. we are taught to be decisive, to move forward with confidence, yet we remain haunted by the possibilities we abandoned along the way, like the career we did not pursue, the city we never moved to, the version of ourselves we never became — these linger in the corners of our minds as reminders of roads not taken. every path we walk will always be shadowed by the paths we leave behind.

there are even times that these alternate lives appear unexpectedly; a passing conversation, a familiar street, or a social media post from a stranger living somewhere we once dreamed of being. suddenly, we are confronted with a version of ourselves that exists only in imagination. we begin constructing stories about who we might have become. in those moments, the unlived life often appears flawless. we imagine fewer mistakes, fewer regrets, and more happiness. what we fail to realize is that these imagined lives are beautiful precisely because they remain imaginary. they have never been tested by reality. they carry all the promise and none of the disappointment.

yet, the greater tragedy lies not in losing those possibilities, but in becoming consumed by them. if we spend our entire lives longing for what could have been, we risk losing what already is. if we are forever yearning for the lives we did not choose, we will inevitably lose this life, too. the present moment slips away while we chase imagined futures and alternate realities that exist only in our minds. we become strangers to our own lives because we’re too busy with mourning the ones we never lived.

there is something deeply ironic about grieving possibilities; we mourn experiences that never truly belonged to us. we ache for people we never met, places we never saw, futures that never happened. meanwhile, the life unfolding directly in front of us waits patiently to be noticed. we become so fascinated with the echo of another existence that we fail to inhabit our own.

and, truly, what makes this longing even more hilarious is that it is, unfortunately, universal. we crave for the life that someone else lives, imagining that they possess the happiness, fulfillment, or certainty that we lack. we look at their achievements and assume they have found the answer we have been searching for yet, unbeknownst to us, the life we are living may be the very life they long for. we stand on opposite sides of the same fence, each convinced that the grass is greener elsewhere. in reality, no matter how rich you think you are, how entirely accomplished you seem, how high of a position at your career you are in right now— there is not enough status, wealth, and achievements that can grant you complete satisfaction. you will still end up wanting, and wondering.

the student dreams of having graduated; the graduate misses the certainty of being a student. the person who stays wishes they had left; the person who leaves wonders what would have happened had they stayed. the single person longs for companionship; the partnered person longs for freedom. we were made to have a remarkable ability to romanticize what we do not possess while overlooking what we already do.

just like adam and eve (yes, it’s adam, too!) in that garden of eden. and, abel and cain. and lot’s wife. and, the prodigal son… and, well, you get the point: we were and are always destined to-be doomed and haunted by the choices we make, and those we didn’t.

i looped the entire hamilton playlist for the nth time the other day, and just as it has every time before, “satisfied” struck me. it’s such a simple line but, “i will never be satisfied,” i think is enough to capture something so fundamental about the human experience. i think that it’s not simply a confession from a character, nor just the mirror between angelica schuyler and alexander hamilton; but, it is an admission shared by nearly everyone who has ever wanted something more than what they have.

no matter where we are in life, there is often a part of us that wants more. we will always desire so carnally for more certainty, more success, more love, and even, selfishly, for more time. we tend to think that satisfaction exists somewhere just beyond our reach, hidden in another choice, another circumstance, or in another version of ourselves. we tell ourselves that if only we had chosen differently, we would finally feel complete. yet, when we arrive at the destination we once hoped for, another horizon appears; another possibility beckons. another life begins to seem more appealing than our own.

perhaps, satisfaction is so elusive because our imagination is limitless while our lives, disappointingly, aren’t. we can create endless possibilities, but we can only inhabit one reality. the gap between those two things creates a longing that follows us wherever we go; like we’ve inevitably made ourselves the ghost of our own. no matter how beautiful our lives become, they can never compete with the infinite perfection of lives that exist only in our mind.

to be human, in some sense, is to live with this tension. we are creatures of possibility, capable of imagining infinite lives while being permitted to live only one. the challenge, then, is not to eliminate longing, but to keep it from overshadowing gratitude. we must eventually learn to accept that every path gained is also a path lost, and that no life can contain every possibility. we cannot keep two things at once; every choice demands an exchange. such is the balance of life, or what i call as, the perpetual movement of its proverbial scale (as you might have an idea now, “as a libra girlie”)

truly, what brought me to writing this piece is because of a simple clip and its subsequent comment section from one T*kT*k video. the caption of the clip goes as: the creator wondering if what their life would have turned out if there had been no restrictions, and that they were able to pursue a career in medicine, considering it as something their heart truly wanted. curious, i opened the comment section and at the top most was someone sharing that they were an MD now, and often they wondered too how their life would have turned out if they didn’t pursue medicine and instead was given time to do the other things they love; what hit me the most was this line i read from the same comment, saying ‘I guess whatever path we take, we will have our own ghosts from the what we could have been. you win some, you lose some. so don’t look at it sadly, sometimes it’s just life presenting itself in a different opportunity’. this perspective had allowed me to dwell, and remember my own experience.

if didn’t answer the call from my employer that day, i would have taken the national examination for upcoming medical students. the road not taken would have been becoming my childhood dream; something i gave up along the way between perfecting my blood smearing technique, and memorizing wizarding spell-like nomenclature of bacteria and parasites. i would never know whether i’d be happy being sleep-deprived for 72-hours straight (and, probably more), living off caffeine, and pure spite and ambition. (although i already do all of those at present, anyway.)

sometimes i wonder about that version of me.

the one who took the examination. the one who got accepted. the one who traded the humming of the machines for hospital rounds, staining processes for stethoscopes, and messy body clock for the privilege of chasing a childhood dream. i wonder if she would feel more fulfilled, more accomplished, more certain that she had chosen correctly. but, then i wonder whether she, too, would find herself staring out of a hospital window at three in the morning, exhausted beyond belief, imagining a different life.

maybe, she would wonder what happened to the version of herself who answered that phone call. maybe, she would imagine me.

the cruel consequence of choosing is that i’ll never know the answer, but the beauty of that is also where its uncertainty lies.

you know, maybe the MD version of me questions her choices just as much as I question mine. maybe, she, too, occasionally finds herself mourning the person she could have been. and, if that is true, then perhaps the question was never about choosing correctly.

maybe, there was never a choice that would have freed me from longing altogether.

maybe every version of us, no matter the choices we make, is always destined to miss something, to lose, to wonder.

and, maybe that is why we so desperately cling to it.

the unlived life never has to prove itself. it never has to survive disappointments; never has to sit through ordinary tuesdays, pay bills, lose people, make mistakes, or discover that some dreams are not quite as beautiful in reality as they were in imagination. the life we are living now must endure heartbreak, failure, embarrassment, boredom, grief, and regret. the life we imagine suffers none of these things; it remains forever suspended in possibility, protected from the things that make real life real.

but, then, again, that is also why it is not ours.

the roads not taken may belong to our curiosity, but they don’t belong to our experience. we can visit them in our thoughts, wonder about them on quiet nights, and mourn them from time to time, but we can’t live inside them.

we only ever get this one; this flawed, unfinished life that asks things from us, that breaks our hearts and heals them, this life that forces us to choose.

the truth is, no matter who we became, another version of ourselves would always remain unlived, unchosen. and, no matter how happy we are, there will always be moments when we wonder.

we have to stop thinking how tragic that is, because maybe that longing is simply the price of being a creature capable of imagining more than one life.

maybe, it’s just a tangible proof that we dreamed, we hoped, and stood at crossroads because we cared deeply about where each gravel may lead.

the goal, then, is not to spend our lives grieving every door that closed behind us, but it is to walk through the one that opened. to love this life enough that, even when we wonder about the others, we keep choosing it.

again, and again. and, again.

because every path gained may be a path lost; but, it’s also a proof of a path that was lived.

i never knew how to swim.

i remember trying to learn once as a child— or, at least, i remember being forced to learn. in, of course, the typical asian way (or, perhaps just in my family), learning to swim meant my older brother, and some cousins (probably), grabbing me by the torso while i was minding my own business poolside, and then unceremoniously throwing me into six-something feet of chlorinated water.

let me tell you: the feeling of drowning, the helplessness; flailing limbs, the inherent human instinct to survive while water filled my mouth and lungs; oh, the panic, the horror, while everyone else only looked on and laughed — overall, not exactly a pleasant core memory to carry into adulthood.

you don’t remember much of the details that happened afterwards; but, you’ll always remember the feeling of being drowned.

i think, i never stopped feeling that.

since then, i have hated deep water. not always in the downright horrified way people speak of fears, mind you; not screaming, not crying, not trembling at the sight of waves. i simply learned to stay away from things that could swallow me whole.

no one quite warns you that transitioning into adulthood often feels remarkably similar to that pool. no one tells you that growing older resembles drowning; not all at once, of course, and sometimes not even dramatically. there are no frantic splashes, no screaming, no desperate gasps clawing toward the surface.

the drowning is quiet; until, you wake up one day and realize your lungs have been heavy for years.

responsibilities pile upon your shoulders like waves; expectations tug at your ankles like undertow. there’s that suffocating feeling of always falling behind, the guilt of believing you should have become more by now. that proverbial white rabbit lingers forever at the edge of your periphery, mocking you for every second lost; and somehow, despite feeling perpetually submerged, the world still expects you to move as though you are breathing normally.

as though you don’t lie awake at three in the morning wondering whether you are becoming someone you love, or merely someone you can tolerate. as though the exhaustion has not settled so deeply within your bones that it has made a home there. as though you don’t smile through conversations while your chest cave inward beneath the unbearable pressure of everything left unsaid.

maybe life is all just about learning how to keep your head above the water long enough for nobody to notice that you’re actually sinking.

someone i deeply care about once recommended that i read our wives under the sea by julia armfield, whom later became one of my favourite writer. i never imagined it would break me as profoundly as it did until i found myself sitting on a video call with that someone, crying so hard i could barely breathe.

at that point, she told me she’d never see me cry that much before.

i’ve never read a book that wrenched my heart out so violently from my ribcage, all because of one line that struck me so deeply i couldn’t even fathom the reason why.

“the alchemist sea, changing something into something else.”

miri never knew how to swim either, despite the lessons leah had tried to teach her. still, miri had brought leah to the water, and watched her become one with the sea.

some days, i feel as though i’m both miri and leah in that scene; both the one holding on, and the one letting go. i watched myself melt into the water, standing there helplessly while simultaneously being carried away by the laps of the waves, swallowed by the murkiness of it all.

there is a peculiar kind of grief in realizing that life transforms you slowly enough that nobody notices it happening; not your friends, not your family, not even yourself. until one day, you look at your own reflection, and feel as though you are meeting someone for the first time.

people often speak of the sea as though it is gentle; in postcards, in poetry, in songs written by people who have only admired it from afar.

aphrodite was born from the seafoam.

they speak of tides, salt air, and sunsets glimmering atop the waves, but rarely of the enormity of it all, rarely of the fact that the sea is ancient enough to swallow entire civilizations without remorse.

i was taught that in prayers, when you rebuke something, you must cast it to the depths of the waters. in the book of micah, there’s a verse there that speaks of God’s promise to hurl iniquities into the depths of the ocean so they are remembered no more.

maybe that’s why the sea fascinates me despite frightening me so deeply.

there’s violence in the drowning; but, peace in the rising.

the waters come and go; they take something from the shore each time they retreat, yet they always return. never truly in the same pattern, but they come back nonetheless.

i still don’t know how to swim.

but, sometimes, i think about wading in anyway, about letting the waves reach my ankles, then my knees, then my chest; about floating instead of fighting.

i still don’t know how to swim, but what i do know is this: the sea does not grieve what it takes.

it transforms.

it softens jagged edges into sea glass, erodes cliffs into shorelines, turns wreckages into reefs teeming with life. even in destruction, there is creation.

we are not so different from that, because, perhaps there are versions of ourselves that must drown so others may rise to the surface; perhaps growing older is simply learning how to mourn each previous version of yourself without clinging so desperately to who you once were.

i still don’t know how to swim. (and, i will never willingly learn how to, unfortunately.)

but, i think the deep waters and i have finally learned to stop fearing each other.

i have always found pomegranates interesting. something about the act of crushing the fruit open; peeling away all the hard layers just to taste what i imagine is the sweet tartness inside. there is something so intimate and profound about it; the splitting, the staining, fingers bruised and bleeding ruby while trying to reach the arils hidden beneath the husk.

the entire process of consuming the fruit feels like a labor of love. and i, being an in-denial romantic, thought that meant loving someone required the grueling process of crushing, peeling, and picking. love, to me, was like eating pomegranates because i thought of myself as one.

i have always been the type of person to keep others— strangers, friends, co-workers, sometimes even family— at arm’s length, in ways so ingrained in me that i could no longer pinpoint where it began. i rarely initiated relations unless spoken to first, i kept to myself; quiet, observant, difficult to approach. people thought i was some evil spawn because apparently, i probably carried regina george’s spirit with me.

you would think i wanted it that way, but i didn’t.

despite how often i isolated myself, i still longed to be known. i yearned for connections to come easily to me the way it seemed for everyone else. i envied people who could slip naturally into conversation without fearing they were being too awkward, too forward, too much. the kind of people who could exchange pieces of themselves effortlessly with someone they had only met hours ago.

i could be fun to talk to. i can hang out after school too, if you want. wanna grab coffee after work? yeah, sure! these were the thoughts that ran quietly in my mind while sitting at the edge of conversations i desperately wanted to belong in, frustrated at myself that i couldn’t push myself to enter. oh, i like matcha, too! there’s this matcha place downtown…

unfortunately, the words rarely went past my mouth.

sometimes, i wished i wasn’t like that. most of the time, i simply hoped someone would just offer even half of their pomegranate with me. i clung to the desperate belief that one day someone would notice the cracks in my walls and find their way through them, that there was nothing inherently wrong with me; it was simply taking time for someone to finally discover how to reach the arils of my soul.

how cruel it was for me to view all my relationships, platonic and romantic alike, that way; to hand people the burden of a labor they never agreed to carry.

the love of my life should be able to see through it all, they’d have to be able to crush me first to know me. why couldn’t i have simply offered them a piece of myself instead of making them fight through every layer first?

perhaps that is one of the many flaws of being human (or, perhaps, just being me): ‘to be loved is to be known’, we long to be understood deeply, yet refuse to hand people the map to the treasure chest of who we are. it’s always, “if i truly matter to them, they’ll know. they must know,” and rarely, “they matter to me, so i should let them know. i must let them know.”

it is always:

can you peel this pomegranate for me?

and rarely:

can i peel this pomegranate for you?

for the longest time, i treated being difficult to reach as proof of being valuable, as if the ache of searching for me would somehow make people stay longer, as if being understood had to be earned through suffering. i handed people riddles instead of honesty. i wanted them to reach for me while i buried myself deeper and deeper beneath the husk, convincing myself that if they loved me enough, they would know exactly where to dig.

but love, real love, is not mind reading.

love endures, yes, but it is not about proving devotion through surviving someone else’s silence.

there are still days when i sit quietly and hope someone notices the parts of me i do not know how to voice. there are still days when i nearly retreat into myself again, when i almost convince myself that being lonely is easier than being known. but, i am beginning to understand that love cannot survive where honesty does not live, and love cannot bloom in places where it is never allowed to open.

the harsh truth of all this is: we are not pomegranates.

we are not fruits waiting to be peeled open to be eaten. we are not made of arils and carpels alone; we are made of flesh, blood, memory, tenderness, and stardusts hidden inside fragile bones. so, we do not have to wait for someone else to cut us open gently enough before we finally deserve love and to give love that people deserve, we do not have to force people through impossible mazes to finally allow ourselves to be cared for and to care in return.

sometimes, sometimes, the love of your life, the person you spend years waiting for, is yourself. not in the lonely sense, nor in the way people say it after heartbreak, as though self-love were merely a consolation prize for not being chosen; rather, i mean it in a way that, eventually we must learn how to hold our own hearts gently instead of hiding them behind impossible conditions, because how could anyone love us freely when we turn everything into a trial?

there was a time when i wanted people to notice and give meaning to every subtle shift in my voice, every delayed reply, every quiet withdrawal. i wanted them to read grief from my silence and call it devotion when they stayed long enough to decipher it. i built walls and secretly hoped someone would bruise their hands trying to climb over them, and when they couldn’t, when they grew tired or confused, i mistook it as proof that i was too difficult to love.

yet, i never stopped to consider how exhausting it must have been to love someone who treated vulnerability like a reward to be earned.

to be honest, i think i feared rejection so deeply that i convinced myself being unknowable was safer than being seen, because if nobody could fully reach me, then nobody could fully abandon me either. i could always tell myself they simply had not tried hard enough, but there is nothing romantic about starving while waiting for someone else to force-feed you affection. there is nothing romantic about building a home out of your own loneliness, bred from your own lofty expectations.

and loving yourself, truly loving yourself, means unlearning that.

it means understanding that vulnerability is not a performance people must earn access through persistence. it means realizing that love was never supposed to feel like excavation. the people we care for are not meant to spend their entire lives digging through layers of silence just to prove they wanted to stay.

i have come to understand that love is supposed to arrive softly, without having to break itself apart just to reach you. the people who love us are not meant to bruise their hands trying to pry us open while we stand quietly behind our own walls, waiting to see if they will try hard enough.

maybe loving yourself means no longer treating your heart like something that must be won through suffering. maybe it means learning how to speak before the silence hardens into distance. is it better to speak or to die?— learning how to hand people honesty before expecting them to decipher us like we’re some sort of code that da vinci needs to break, learning that being known is not the same thing as being conquered.

i no longer want to be loved like a locked door.

i no longer want intimacy to feel like someone forcing their way through every layer of me while i wait on the other side, hoping they will not leave. i do not want people to have to bleed just to reach the softest parts of me.

i want love to feel easy in the ways it is allowed to be easy. not shallow, not careless, but gentle, offered freely instead of withheld like a prize.

being the love of your own life doesn’t immediately mean that you stop needing others, nor does it mean that loneliness suddenly transforms into empowerment. it simply means finally learning how to meet yourself with the tenderness you spent years waiting for someone else to give you first.

maybe all those time, i was waiting for someone to peel the pomegranate for me because i didn’t know how to do it myself.

but now, i am learning. (and, learning so painfully, and achingly).

i’m learning how to split myself open without shame. how to offer the sweetness of my heart without forcing people to carve through every hard layer first, how to stop mistaking suffering for depth.

now, i am learning to peel my own pomegranate, so that when people arrive, they no longer have to bruise their hands trying to reach the sweetness hidden beneath the husk.

Photo from Pinterest.

i hated yellow.

it was too bright for me, too vibrant. when worn, i found it unflattering against my skin tone. outfits were difficult to coordinate, accessories even more so. more than that, i abhorred yellow because i believed it was the antithesis of who i was; that is, someone deep in the throes of teenage angst, carrying a chronic disdain for everything remotely sunshine-y.

at first, it felt as though the universe was mocking me for sending me a someone who, by all means, was yellow in human form. it seemed impossible to meet someone in real life that you would describe as an absolute sunshine without sounding sarcastic. but, this friend? oh, she truly did put both the sun and shine in sunshine.

some say that we tend to absorb the mannerisms and behavior of those we often surround ourselves with. in relationships, it means that the longer you spend with someone, the more you begin to become each other: code-switching, music tastes, habits unconsciously borrowed, and all the countless little imitations too miniscule to notice. you probably heard it somewhere before that long-term couples often end up looking alike, their lives so intertwined that they begin to mirror one another; DNAs fusing. in some ways, it is true. to love someone is to adapt to them, to make room for them within yourself, and this does not apply only to romance, but to every relationship that truly matters.

things between my friend and i got busy; different cities, heavier responsibilities, the slow and grueling passage of time. i can’t remember what she looks in person very well, nor can i recall how our friendship began, but i’ll always associate her with yellow, in every way possible— a yellow raincoat, the rays of the sun, sunflower fields, petrichor, the hope for tomorrow, all the good in the bad.

i used to think people only change us in dramatic ways, like in the movies wherein a heartbroken female lead would grab the nearest shears, lock herself in the bathroom, cue a montage of trimming her gorgeous long locks into this short pixie while mascara ran down her face to symbolize reinvention. but, sometimes and really, more often that not, change happens quietly, slipping into the smallest corners of who we are and burrows itself there; an english teacher who’s famously hard to please praises you and suddenly it makes you believe you can take on the world, an older sister’s stubbornness may live in the way you refuse to quit, a friend with a quiet nature may teach you that there’s peace in solitude. even people who leave take something with them, and leave something behind in return.

perhaps, that is what loving people truly does to us, it allows them to rearrange us. every person we allow ourselves to cherish adds a shade that lasts for eternity, something that we never possessed before. some bring courage, some bring humor, some bring softness, some bring pain. and, when enough time has passed, we look at ourselves and wonder when we became someone new.

the answer is simple: we were not alone, we were never truly alone.

so, when i catch myself reaching for something yellow, i realize i’m not choosing a color i once hated. instead, i am choosing the memory of someone who taught me warmth without ever intending to. without noticing, i absorbed pieces of her into the person i became.

i am still myself, of course. but, in every bright thing i once rejected and now embraced, there are traces of others.

especially yellow.

Photo from Pinterest.

the former religious kid turned queer isn't an original experience. in fact, it's as though growing up in a religious household has become some sort of essential requirement into the eventual acceptance that in you lies a fruit; the prelude to the realization that there's something in you waiting to be named.

to say that i was born a christian is a severe understatement; a part of my name was derived from the word itself. for most of my childhood, i was brought up in the church around pastors, church leaders, and other church-raised kids. my favorite books as a child, if i were being completely honest, were those that told bible stories, especially the ones with illustrations. i remember my favorite being the one wherein baby jesus was born, laid in a manger; soft, quiet, and holy.

in another life, i would have been on my way to becoming a youth pastor; maybe, i was already. in this life, i am a queer, young adult wondering if god loves me less for doing the same thing i was taught against.

the thing is, i wasn't just your average religious kid — i was the religious kid. the one who spread the good news of salvation to those who needed it, who knelt besides the defeated and guided them towards the light, told people that god can forgive any sin if they accepted him as their lord and savior. i stood at the pulpit, spoke my testimony, led praise and worship... and i loved it. there was nothing that brought such lightness in my chest than serving god in whatever way i could.

sure, perhaps i was "groomed" for it; but, the way i created my bond with god, i couldn't see it in a way that was forced. many churchgoers have different images of god; a savior, cornerstone, something distant and divine; but, to me, i saw him as "abba father". he was dad. in a world where i always had difficulties of feeling that sense of belongingness, the only place where i felt as though i fit was when i knelt down, tears in my eyes, and whispered "abba father", carrying everything that i could not speak.

so, you could just imagine the unraveling that followed when i realized that i liked looking at girls; that they made me feel in a way i never felt for boys. it became a terrible, quiet war of nature versus nurture, and, well, you can just probably tell who won.

i think every queer kid knows what it's like to pray to become normal. i asked god to take away that sin from me, the sin of the flesh, because i didn't want to end up like sodom. i prayed because i knew it was wrong, yet when i was in a position to finally be with a woman — it had only felt right. when i held her hand and looked at her, there was no impending doom; only the very sure truth that there was no place i'd rather be but here. when i was with her, i understood so intimately what had probably been circling in the mind of the author of songs of solomon when they wrote all those passages.

i wonder when i had started to feel as though i was "sinning" so gravely, when all i did was love someone. when did love become something that could damn me?

didn't jesus say that the greatest of these is love? that it is love, above all things, that endures? isn't it because of love that he died for our sins; that even in pain, sorrow, and fear, he still chose to do what he was meant to do out of love for humanity?

why, then, is it a tragedy to love someone the way i was taught to love?

for such a long time, there was no answer. or, maybe, there was but not in the way i was taught to expect.

'why do these people keep demanding a miraculous sign?'

maybe god was never loud. maybe he didn't speak through thunder, or condemnation. maybe he was in the stillness after i cried myself to sleep, or in the strange, stubborn warmth in my chest that refused to leave, no matter the many moments i had rebuked and begged him to remove that part of me.

and, then, somewhere along the way, i began to notice something.

if this love was so wrong, why did it felt so familiar? why did it feel like the same softness i felt when i prayed, the same fullness in my chest when i sang worship songs with my eyes closed?

it didn’t feel like sin; it felt like him.

maybe that was the part i was terrified of the most.

if loving her felt the same as loving god, then somewhere along the way, something didn’t add up. either i had misunderstood love, or i had misunderstood the rules i was given about it.

perhaps, then, it wasn't love that was wrong; perhaps, it was the fear.

the one that had been taught to me in sunday school classrooms, wrapped in stories of fire and brimstone. the fear that told me god’s love had conditions, fine print, exceptions. the fear that sounded a lot like people, but never quite like the “dad” i used to cry out to.

so, now, i stand in between.

i'm not the devoted child i once was, but it's not entirely gone, either. i could still quote john 3:16 from memory; i just don't stand the pulpit anymore, nor lead the worship.

but, sometimes, in the quiet, i still whisper “abba," waiting to see if he answers the same way he used to; not with fear, not with silence, but with something that feels like home.

Photo from Pinterest.

the translation of amor fati is love of fate or love of one’s fate. for someone who used to scoff at the thought of an external, or higher being having the ‘say’ on how your life should go — it’s a shock now that i have those exact words permanently written over my skin, an eternal reminder of my succumbing.

i was never a control freak, per se, but looking back, i did sometimes live by the occasional motivational phrases like: ‘the lion lives in you,‘ or ‘no retreat, no surrender‘ or ‘hold the reins of your own life‘, and my favorite, ‘master of my fate, captain of my soul‘. i was a chronic believer that i made the world revolve around me, instead of the other way around. lucky girl syndrome, or an undiagnosed case of narcissism? in the wise words of kanye, “i guess we’ll never know.”

and, for a while, it worked. they say whatever you feed in your mind, manifests in your reality. so, it’s important to remain optimistic — even in the event of a Job-like level of batshit crazy catastrophe? yes, even so! (excuse my religious trauma). i thought i had everything control, i thought everything worked out for me; for a moment, i was invincible, untouchable, completely bulletproof. . . which is to say that when things didn’t go the way i wanted it to, it frankly became the equivalent of the end of the world to me. unfortunately, it was that dramatic. however, after a series of unfortunate events (disappointments), it painfully and gradually became apparent to me that i was, perhaps, looking at life with rose-colored glasses.

humans have way evolved since the discovery of fire, yet until now, scientists still cannot predict the exact when, where, and what of an earthquake. it’s classified as a natural disaster, an inevitable that occurs when you live on a planet wherein the pacific ring of fire exists, and other related factors like fault lines, and the earth being an actual living, breathing thing. in the same way, we cannot truly predict the loss of a loved one, or winning the lottery. we think we can prepare for these moments, but when it does happen, the whiplash still catches us offguard.

that’s the beauty of life, i guess. there are simply things that’s out of our hands. we can try to take hold of some things, but the bigger picture would still be out of grasp. you could spend years doing sports, all that training and discipline, yet a torn ACL or even just a twisted, sprained ankle can flip it all to a complete hundred and eighty. life has a way to humble everyone, perhaps, to remind us that we are only specks in the grand scheme of things, merely stardusts in an entire galaxy.

there are infinite possibilities in life, and all of it works for the good. life sometimes offers you lemons, oranges, kiwis, pomegranates, an entire fruit basket of sorrow, and tragicomedy; simply, you must believe that you are where you need to be. you wanted an apple? i got a better one, here’s an orange.

it matters in the perspective: nothing can ruin whatever’s already meant for you. every decision, earthquakes, trust that it will eventually lead you to your ultimate destination. the good, the bad, the ugly, and horrid — they’re all meant to happen for us to become who we are.

(don’t throw your proverbial rocks at me ya’ll.)

surrender, as you know it, isn’t soft. it didn’t came in peace for me; it was me kicking, and screaming, tearing my shirt into two, ugly crying to the universe how unfair that situation felt. my hardwork, all the effort i put in, all the love i gave, speeding down the drain until all that’s left is a hollow ache; the never-ending yearning of what could’ve been, and the eternal grief of what should’ve been.

then, one day, i chose violence, sat on chair, and had those two annoying words become an artful scar of all the things i had to let go of. a constant reminder of the ruins of what i thought my life would look like, and deciding, albeit, begrudgingly that perhaps, this version of my life deserves a chance, too. the harsh truth is that i’ll probably always think about all the opportunities i missed, the love i lost, the friends i stopped trying to connect with, and all the other circumstances that have eventually lead me here. but, if i had a chance to redo something, i would take it in a heartbeat, just like any sane person would, because loving fate, amor fati, doesn’t mean romanticizing every disaster — it simply means you stop fighting the fact that it did happen, and it did change you and still being flawed, selfish, and human enough to long for what you lost.

so, no, i didn’t get the words ‘master of my fate‘ permanently branded over me, neither did i get a lovely picture of a me in a pirate hat commandeering a boat over an ocean of stars (although, that was extremely tempting) to commemorate my taking of control.

i chose surrender over defeat.

amor fati.